What we can imagine

The kitchen grew steamy as I chopped four pounds of tomatoes we’d picked from our garden over the weekend. I had only a few days left before going back to work for the school year, and there are only so many tomatoes you can eat in a day. I’d already made fresh salsa and sliced up a few to accompany meals. So, it was time to can a few jars–to “put them up” for the winter as they say around here. (Do they say that other places?)

It took hours by the time I washed and diced the tomatoes, filled the canning jars, located the canning supplies and processed them. Those four-ish pounds of tomatoes only made four pint jars and a part of me wondered why I go to all the effort. We planted the seeds months ago. We watered and weeded and tended the garden all that time. And here now I was spending more time creating something that I could easily drive to the store and buy. It’s not even about saving money when you count the cost of the plants and the time spent.

Why? Why do I go to all the effort to can four jars of tomatoes to use this winter?

—

A day earlier Phil and I went to the store. It was a quick trip after dinner and back-to-school night at the elementary school. We needed milk for breakfast the next morning, which always leads to more purchases in the dairy aisle. This seems to be the reason we go to the store most often, to replenish things like milk, cheese and yogurt.

Only self-checkout lanes were open when we had finished our list. This is usually fine with me. I prefer the self-checkout most of the time, but I found it odd that there was no cashier working at all. Granted, it was late in the day and there are staffing shortages everywhere, but it almost felt eerie.

“This is how the robots take over,” I said to Phil as we crossed the parking lot. I was joking. I think. There’s a fine line sometimes between dark humor and cynicism and I don’t always know the difference.

As we watched baseball that night after the kids went to bed, a commercial came on for a rowing machine that offers picturesque backgrounds and encouraging coaches, the rowers’ answer to Peloton, I suppose.

“We’re never going outside again, are we?” I remarked. By “we” I meant “humanity.”

Now, let me be clear that I don’t find fault with anyone who buys and uses such a machine. I’m all for health and fitness however you can manage it. I use empty juice and milk jugs filled with water as my dumbbells because I hate the idea of going to a gym to work out and there was no weightlifting equipment available for purchase that was in my budget during the pandemic . When my kids were little and sometimes even now in the dead of winter or on a rainy day, I think I would give almost anything to have a treadmill or other kind of exercise equipment in our house. That we have neither the money nor the room for such a machine is only one obstacle. Personally, I prefer the outdoors, even when it’s cold and rainy.

Maybe humanity isn’t on the brink of collapse because of self-checkouts and virtual rowing machines, but in the midst of a pandemic (yes, we’re still in the midst of it), it’s not hard to imagine a world like this–where machines provide our connection to humans or replace them all together.

I don’t want to live in that world.

—

I recently read Glennon Doyle’s latest book, Untamed, and there’s a lot I could say about it, but one of the chapters that stuck with me had to do with imagination. She says that when we look at the visible order of things happening around us–violence, injustice, that sort of thing–and believe there is a different way, that’s faith. “This is not how things are meant to be,” she writes. “We know that there is a better, truer, wilder way. … Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”

I’m stuck on this idea that when we picture the world in a truer, more beautiful way we aren’t just daydreaming, we’re remembering.

She continues: “Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine. The truest, most beautiful families we can fathom. The truest, most beautiful world we can hope for. Let’s put it all on paper. Let’s look at what we’ve written and decide that these are not pipe dreams; these are our marching orders. These are the blueprints for our lives, our families, and the world. May the invisible order become visible. May our dreams become our plans.”

—

This brings me back to the tomatoes and the canning and the virtual rowers. In the truest, most beautiful world I can imagine, humanity reconnects with the earth. There is something almost magical about growing a tomato then saving it in a jar for later. Tasting a canned tomato from summer in the middle of winter is a kind of remembering because no red-looking tomato in the store in December tastes as good as one fresh off the vine in August. 

“Ah, yes,” my tastebuds say. “This is what a tomato tastes like.”

Most of my food comes from a grocery store, it’s true, but sometimes I need to be reconnected to the source of that food. I need to go to the garden and pick the vegetables we eat for dinner. I need to know the farmer who raises the meat I eat. I need to learn where the food I buy comes from, what impact it has on the environment, how I can be a responsible consumer. I need to remember that food does not magically appear in the grocery store. That there is a long line of people involved in the process–from the grower to the picker to the factory worker to the trucker to the stocker.

And I need to see the world around me, not just in pictures and not just through my phone screen, but really see it. And smell it. And feel it. I can listen to the ocean waves through my earbuds and it calms me, but until I see it in person, I forget how vast the ocean is. How small I am. My soul is lifted by pictures of trees, of forests, but nothing compares to the damp, woodsy smell. How my lungs expand taking in the fresh, oxygenated air provided by the trees. When I walk through the woods, my feet remind my brain that this world is not new, that generations have walked these paths before, that we do not own the earth. The land does not belong to us, and how we use it says a lot about who we are.

When I touch the earth–balancing on a rock or running my hand through a stream or sifting through the soil–I remember that this place where I live, this planet that sustains life, is itself alive. And I have a responsibility to care for it.

In the most beautiful world I can imagine, humanity is in harmony with the earth. 

—

In this world I can imagine, I am a creator. Words become sentences become stories. And not as a commodity. At least, not just for that reason. In the truest, most beautiful world I can imagine, I create for the sake of creating.

I think of this sometimes as I sit on the couch watching TV and completing cross-stitch patterns. I do this as a way to occupy my hands while I’m engaged in a screen, and because I like watching a blank canvas become something, little by little. I don’t create my own patterns or sell my creations. I’ve given a few away as gifts, but mostly I do cross-stitch just for the sake of doing it.

I do not yet see my writing this way, but I’m trying to imagine it.

Could I create a story for the sake of creating, without the expectation that it will someday be something to sell and market? (I don’t know if I can fully separate this latter thought from my writing because I still feel like writing is meant to be read.)

But like the canned tomatoes, there are easier ways to fulfill my need for story. Reading what other people have written is like buying canned tomatoes from the store. It’s more convenient than doing it myself.

But it’s not as fulfilling.

Something happens inside of me when I take that tomato off the vine and bring it into the kitchen, when I collect pounds of them and fill several jars with diced tomatoes. I feel good. Confident. Like I’ve tended something in my care and tended it well. Preserved it for the future.

Could I say the same for my words?

Could I pluck them out of my head and fill pages with them, preserving them for some future use? It takes more time and effort, yes, but something happens inside of me when I do it. It’s part of what makes me alive.

—

I know that for a lot of us, what we can see in the world right now doesn’t look true or beautiful. And that can cause despair. Or indifference. Sometimes it’s easier to look away than to look at the hard things directly. Sometimes it burns like when we stare at the sun.

But what if we looked at the world and said: It doesn’t have to be this way.

And if it doesn’t have to be this way, can we imagine the way it could be?

What kind of world can we picture when we let our imaginations run free?

And how can we make it so?